


Ticking Away

by kittydesade



Category: Journeyman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Livia learns what it means to be a time traveller.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ticking Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eisoj5](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisoj5/gifts).



The whole damn world was falling apart. Now that the war was over, everywhere Livia looked it was celebrations or misery. Some people celebrated they were still alive. Some people looked around, all they saw was hard times ahead. Who did which depended on whether or not they'd taken part in the war, and what their prospects were. Whether or not they'd gotten dragged into the war against their will, like some of Livia's friends. 

Liv hadn't decided. The forties hadn't been good to her, or her mother. She'd been pulled out of high school and sent to the camps just when a good woman's college was in her sights. Somehow, her mother had kept her from getting into real trouble on account of her temper, but especially after they released everyone without apology she resented the suspicion with which everyone looked at her. Too much fear and not enough common sense or decency. She wasn't even Japanese. Not that they knew or cared to see the difference. 

She stamped the books and shoved them into the stack. The last one toppled it over. "Damn," she snapped. Both of the librarians looked over at her. "Sorry."

Livia scandalized them, but the University director said she was staying, no question. She was the best assistant they'd had in two years, and it was that or make it a student position. Students always got scarce two weeks before exam time, so half-Korean woman with language that would make a sailor blush it was. They got to glare at her, keep eyes on her, and make sure she knew she was on thin ice. Liv got to push them. Not much else.

"Two more..." she looked up at the clock. "Okay, two more hours. I can do this." And homewards, after, with a couple fresh books in her bag. An interesting book on unusual medical cases at the turn of the century, a history of the founding of the United States with primary text material, and one biography. Half-crushed under those hid the Chandler novels she used to take her breaks with. Just because she was working as the library scut now didn't mean she was going to stay there, no matter what anyone said. "I can do this." Get through the day, at least. Getting out of the lowest of library positions and into learning something useful was a whole other problem.

Left on her own for another five minutes, she might have gotten the rest of The Lady in the Lake done. Beatrice saw her reach for her bag, and wheeled over a cart of books.

"If you're not doing anything, you might help get these back on the shelves," she smiled. Clenched teeth. Bitch.

Liv slapped a smile on her face as soon as she lifted her head. "Of course," she cooed. Once out of sight, she grabbed the handle of the cart like it was the woman's neck and squeezed. "You don't have to be such a poisonous bitch about it," she muttered in the rough direction of her sweater collar. 

The entire fiction section looked like a tornado had hit. No one in the library could agree on how to shelve the Alice in Wonderland books, and half of Oz lay scattered on the bottom shelf. She stepped on and bent a good copy of Princess of Mars some jackass had left on the floor, though as far as books to kick around went, the Mars ones were a decent choice. Down the aisles again. Theresa had good reason not to do the shelving, it hurt her back to bend down too much, but Beatrice had been chatting on the library phone with her fella for the last hour. No reason she hadn't gotten this done herself. Except she was waiting for Liv to have nothing to do.

Livia kept up a good head of steam till she got to the end of the aisle and turned the cart into the next one, double-checking to make sure. "811, 81--" No, she'd gotten turned around. "Wait a second..." 

No, she hadn't gotten turned around, the numbers had. Or they should be numbers. Those were letters.

"What the hell?" 

The rows of books had changed. The shelves themselves had changed. Now that she looked up and around, the light had changed. The windows were tinted glass instead of clear over wire lattice, the carpet had gone from rough and gray to soft and slate blue. Liv turned, and turned again, and it all stayed the same. Or rather, it stayed not the same as when she'd come to work that morning. She kept turning until she smacked her hip into the more rounded corner of the plastic-sounding cart and went sprawling against the shelf, scattering books everywhere. 

"Here," a smiling older Negro gentleman started picking up books without preamble. "Let me help you."

  


  


  


It took her two jumps to figure out what was going on, and a third to get it right. Or at least, she assumed she got something right because she stopped jumping back and forth. But by that time her relations with the librarians were even more strained than they had been and she felt she'd be lucky to still have a job in the two days the older man had said it would take for him to find her. She still didn't know what that meant. Two days in her time, two days of whatever strange time she'd been passing through? It felt like being abducted to fairyland. Gone a day, back in a century. Or maybe the other way around.

When he caught up with her again she had jumped, and it took her the better part of an hour to find something that would tell her she was in the twentieth, no, twenty-first century. All around her there were flickering screens, in more colors and with more clarity than she'd ever seen them before. Some of them small enough to be held in the palm of her hand, they looked like televisions. Very tiny televisions, or tiny computers. Some of them had wires connecting to people's ears. Everyone was loud, everywhere, and there were more people on the streets, more sounds. More choices. 

"You look a bit lost," a cheerful voice popped up behind her, and Liv's shoulders stiffened. In another minute or three she'd have a terrific backache. "Bet you'd like a cuppa."

All she could do was nod. "You know what's happening to me, don't you." There he stood, perfectly calm, and she didn't know whether she was coming or going. Anger at the old man kept bumping up against fear, worry that she wouldn't get back this time. There was a limit to how much she would mouth off with her future, her life, maybe her sanity, one or all three at stake.

"Might be I know a few things," he nodded. He looked more at home here in this electric bright future, too. Dressed like the rest of them, while she felt like her shoes were too big and her skirt was too starched. 

She brushed her bangs off of her forehead, then remembered that bangs were for not being in her eyes and smoothed them down again. "And are you going to tell me these things?" 

"Let's go have a drink."

He took her to a place that was all deep, dark browns and greens. Not a soda fountain in sight. The coffee came in fancy Italian flavors, he ordered something called an Americano for both of them that seemed the closest to actual coffee, she had no idea what they did in Italy. Or, for that matter, why all their coffee had immigrated to the United States. A lot of people had those small boxy devices here, too, some people had little color televisions with typewriter keyboards attached to them. And no one was staring at her, which was almost as remarkable as their televisions. Or if they stared, it seemed more like they were staring at the way Livia herself was staring around trying to take it all in without looking like a rube. "What's going on?" she leaned forward, keeping her voice low because jumping back and forth through time couldn't be something everyone did in the future. Could it? "What are we doing here?"

The Negro man leaned forward too, trying for an attitude of giving friendly advice to a young person. He looked like he'd be more at home in one of those new blues bands than in a coffee shop, and still no one was staring. "There's something here you're supposed to do. You might not know what it is, yet, but you will. The assignments make themselves clear as you go." 

"Assignments? Someone assigns these..." 

He shook his head. "That's what I call them, but we don't know. All we know is that we do go, and we have to help the people we find when we do. It's usually someone common to all your trips," he added, gesturing with his coffee. "So you start to recognize them when you're away."

Liv blinked at him. Because she couldn't think of anything else to do, she couldn't even make her hands move to bring her paper cup to her mouth. "When I'm away? Help people." That didn't make sense. "Help. People? I can't even help myself, I can't ... I can't think, I can't concentrate. I can't even stay..." She couldn't even control the volume of her voice, because now they stared at her. In annoyance, for interrupting their work. What kind of work did one do on tiny televisions with typewriter keys, typing? Taking dictation? 

Maybe that was what the thing on the one man's ear was for, taking dictation. Though how that worked she didn't know. 

No, she dragged her attention back to the man across from her at the table. "I can't even keep a job, at this rate, what can I do to help someone?"

"I have no idea," he spread his hands, smiling in the way of an old bluesman accepting the world for what it was. "But I'm sure you can. I got faith in you." 

She opened her mouth to point out that he didn't know her from a hole in the ground, only something twisted in her stomach and by the time she looked up from the table it was a different table. There were soda machines along the wall, the bluesman was gone, and she was getting stared at again. Liv clenched her jaw against all those things she couldn't say and left.

  


  


  


She lost her job. Helped two people. Moved back home, head low in defeat, to the tune of her mother's clicking her tongue and suggesting the names of several nice young men. Liv didn't want a nice young man. She wanted her damn job at the library back. 

At least they couldn't take her library privileges away, and she came back with two stacks of books this time, one stack of historical encyclopedias of events, and one stack of Jules Verne, HG Wells. There wasn't a single scientific text she could look in to find the answers to this, but perhaps there was something in science fiction. They had dreamed up worlds no one had yet imagined, maybe one of them was a time traveler?

Like she was. Only she didn't have the benefit of the scientist's machine. She was the machine, somehow. A broken machine that blinked in and out of time without any control over when she went, though she always seemed to end up somewhere in or near the city. So that was something, but if she knew how she was doing it, she could avoid disappearing for five hours during her shift and being fired for walking off the job. But none of the books had an answer for that.

"What are you doing?" her mother called up the stairs. 

She was writing a letter. To Professor Einstein, who had espoused all sorts of mad ideas, who had spoken just a couple of years ago very publically against race prejudice, who might have some idea what was happening to her. In the sorts of terms that she could accept as being something real, rather than her losing her mind.

Her mother's footsteps came up to the door. "Livia, is there something ..."

The rest of the words were lost in a haze of pain and then she was forward again. Somehow. But not as far forward, she was starting to recognize the little things now. There were more people carrying those circular disc players and fewer pocket televisions. Computers. The headphones were bigger, though still not quite what she was used to. Clothes were looser, but that was about all she could see. It was winter and she was freezing.

There was a homeless shelter ahead of her. A church-based one, she guessed, by the church right next door to it. She could go there. Pretend to be one of the huddled masses. Have a warm blanket and maybe a cup of something hot to drink, but that meant being a homeless person. She had more pride than that.

More pride and less sense, because she turned to walk in the opposite direction and tripped over someone else's legs. "Watch where you're going," he muttered, in a way that made her wish she had some big, heavy stick. 

"Sorry," she said, instead of _I thought I was watching_ or _You watch where you're putting your feet_ or anything else of that sort.

The man grunted, then pulled himself up out of the pile of rags and cardboard, creating a waft of stench that passed over her and was, to her surprise, not as offensive as she'd expected. He more smelled like he'd been bathing in curry spices. "Look like you belong somewhere else," he told her through a mouthful of cold sores and inflamed gums. "What're you doing here?"

"I wish I knew," she muttered. He had no idea where she was from. She had no idea who he was, what he was doing there, she didn't want to know.

"You from Hawaii?"

Liv blinked at him. Of all the questions she'd been asked, well, that was one of them, but usually when they asked it they were in her own time. And more hostile. The polite ones, anyway, the mean ones asked why she hadn't been shipped off with the rest of the Japs. "I'm Korean," she told him. Rudely. Or so she thought.

"Don't look it," he grunted. "Saw 'nough of those ladies to last me more than a lifetime."

That, too, wasn't something she expected. And she didn't know what he was talking about. "Ex-cuse me?" 

"The war, girl. Where you grow up, some cornfield in Kansas?"

She would have been stung by that if she weren't trying to grasp all the history she'd missed. There had been a war. A war in which Korea had been involved, did her mother know about that? Had her mother known? What was going on while she was here in the future? "I didn't..." She tried to come up with some plausible excuse why she hadn't known what he was talking about. "I didn't mean..."

"Guess you think it didn't apply to you," he turned, rummaging around behind him. "Your Mom were American too, that it?"

"She, uh. She emigrated. When she married my father." When they were young, was all Livia knew, and it had to do with the war, and her mother had taken an American name and left all that behind her. Supposedly. It was hard, during the war. And there it was, that was her key. "I mean, it was hard during the war, but. That's all in the past now, right? No," she shook her head again, because she knew how that sounded. "I didn't mean that, I meant..."

"All just folk, now, I know what you mean. Here," he handed out something to her that only looked like a coat if she squinted and put some fantasy onto it. At least it didn't crawl with vermin, like she'd expected. "You're freezing, girl, put the damn coat on and stop turning your nose up at it like you got a choice."

"Thank you kindly," the bluesman's voice crooned over her shoulder, and his gnarled hand reached to take the coat and drape it over her shoulders. "Is what she meant."

"Yes," she made herself smile. "Thank you."

When they were out of earshot she whirled on him. "What was that? What are you doing here?" She grabbed at the lapels of the coat and yanked. They didn't fall off. "What is this?" 

"Looks like a coat to me," he chuckled. As though it was funny. "Think that might be the one?"

"I don't know," and she didn't care just at the moment. "What did he mean, the war? There was a war against Korea?"

He shook his head. "N'aw. There was a war 'tween the Koreas. The South and the North, split up after the World War, you should remember that and all." Liv nodded, slow and wary. "Give it a couple years, you'll see what's going on."

She didn't know that she wanted to do that. All that this jumping around had gotten her was a lost job, lost income and freedoms, and now it had gotten her cold and alone in a strange place. "A couple of _years_?" 

"Believe it or not, you'll get used to it. I know it seems crazy now, seems like the kind of thing you never can wrap your head around. But you get used to it. A body can get used to anything, given enough time. And the world's changing all around us anyway. World'll change more than you expect, in ways you never expected, and while you live in it, you'll get to see how we come out here from where you are now."

Liv didn't see how that was possible. She'd never gotten lost in a place more than once in her life, but now even though she might know where she was, she had to figure out _when_ she was, with no event markers, nothing to tell her until she was able to read a newspaper or see a calendar. Which apparently were in short supply in the future. "There are still limits," she started to say, turning back around to talk to the bluesman. Only he had jumped out, too. Back to wherever he was from. "Oh for the love of..."

  


  


  


Getting used to jumping was far, far easier now that she had coherent notes. After the last conversation she'd had with her ersatz mentor she had started carrying around a notebook and some pens and pencils, taking notes and quick sketches of the things she saw, trying to coordinate it all to a timeline. It helped, a little. The letter went off to Professor Einstein as soon as she got back from whenever it was, but she didn't expect much of a reply. Maybe in the next letter she could include her notes, and he could make something of them. That hope made her pay even more attention to the smaller details and picking up more quickly on what she was supposed to be doing. As a result, either by reward or by experience, her jumps became longer. More stable. And quicker, back to the time she came from.

Thinking about it made no sense, and required words she didn't have in English or any other language she knew. But at least she thought she was getting the hang of it. Finding her balance in a strange, future world that was supposed to still be her own.

The people she jumped forward to help had names given to them by parents, sometimes by a single parent, or a grandparent. They had families, most of them, some of them had jobs. One of them had lost their job through no fault of their own, like her, and the government was refusing to pay her disability. Liv wasn't sure what the bureaucracy of it all was, but she could sympathize. That kind of problem was familiar. And that seemed to be all she was required to do. Sympathize. Talk. Provide an ear and a voice to agree with their rage or their grief or shore up their hope. She took to writing down each incident after it happened, things she had said and things they had described, and tried to find some common element to what had happened. There didn't seem to be one. She jumped, she talked to people for a little while, she jumped back. And then it was over.

She asked her parents about it one night, while her mother scraped dinner together in the kitchen, while she and her father played gin rummy at the small table. "Do you think it's possible for one person to, to just be in the right place at the right time, and make..." her hands gestured with her words, unconsciously flashing her cards to her father before he took them and firmly turned them back upwards again. "Oops. Make such a big difference that it changes everything? I mean..."

"For want of a nail?" Her father shrugged. "It's possible. There was an advisor to a King once, who was assassinated because his King said a few angry words in the heat of the moment. " Her father was a history teacher. She should have expected that, really. "Wars have been started because someone threw a counselor out a window. Henry VIII divorced a woman because she had a face like a horse."

"Joseph!" 

"That one might be apocryphal," he admitted, but winked at Liv when her mother's back was turned. "What brought this on?"

She had to invent a story about a friend in crisis who she wasn't sure she was doing her any good. Someone she had met at the library, who she still kept in touch with now and again. The details of the crisis she lifted from one of her jumps, but meeting friends was as good an excuse as any for half her disappearances out of the house. When she disappeared during the day, at least. The jumps at odd hours of the night or morning, if her parents noticed, that was more difficult to fake. By the time she was finished lying her mother had put dinner on the table, and steam wisped up from the potatoes as they listened. Liv folded her hands and ducked her head. She'd never lied to her parents this much before.

"And I just don't know if I'm doing anything good, if I'm getting anything done," she mumbled into the table. Now that the words were all out there it sounded plaintive and juvenile. 

Her parents looked at each other. It was that sort of look that had a suggestion about what she could do with her life at the end of it, and if the words "schoolteacher" passed her mother's lips Liv thought she might scream. 

"Sometimes," her mother said instead, "Liv, sometimes it does help to have someone there who will listen. Who will point you in a direction, even if it isn't one you're willing to go yet, sometimes it helps to know that there's a direction you can go. Or that someone is willing to listen to you and treat you like you matter."

Liv started to ask, then thought about all the times when she was brushed off or ignored, when the librarian in charge smiled and took her schedule and then assigned her to days she couldn't manage and refused to believe she had ever said those days were off-limits. When the government goons had come for her and her mother because Korean and Japanese were the same thing, legally, technically, in the most extreme sense of some vague physical resemblance. Every time she was stamped and filed away in a locked cabinet with someone else's fingerprints all over her details. So much of what she did involved helping people keep their self-respect and their identities while they were processed through an insurance policy, through a disaster relief petition, through disability. Not all of it, but a lot.

"Sometimes I don't see how I'm helping. At all. It doesn't seem like I'm able to do anything..." Thumb and forefinger pressed against the corners of her eyes. She could feel a headache coming on, a normal one, complete with stress fever. 

Her father put a glass of water in front of her, which she drank most of in one swallow. "People aren't like arts and crafts, unfortunately," he started dishing out some dinner for himself, which was her cue to do the same. "You can't slap on some glue and call it fixed. All you can do is, well. Be kind. And do what you know how to do, the best you can."

Liv stuffed a fork full of potatoes into her mouth before she said something more, because now it was down to whining and not wanting to do her work. Both of her parents took a dim view of indulging in more than momentary whining and putting off responsibilities. It was something of a miracle they didn't think she was doing that already, but then, jobs for half-Korean women who wouldn't keep their thoughts to themselves were in short supply. And neither of her parents had ever encouraged her to hide her intelligence. 

"I guess I'll have to," she muttered, both to herself and so her parents would consider the matter settled. "No one else's doing it."

  


  


  


For all that it felt that way, especially after she stopped seeing the old Negro man whose name turned out to be Omar, she wasn't the only one doing it. She _had_ met two others, one tiny blonde woman on a brief trip through a concert in a field somewhere, and she'd run into an irascible bald man in a suit with some truly odd tattoos at a political convention. 

It was the cranky bald man who'd given her the proof she'd needed, so at least it wasn't a complete waste of time. She still came away from that last meeting wanting to hit him with something.

"This isn't going to work," Liv muttered to herself, pacing up and down in the kitchen. "This isn't going to work. This is crazy." She didn't even believe it, herself, not entirely. "This is stupid. This isn't going t--" 

The door creaked open. Her parents were home. 

Liv hid the rolled up advertisement behind her back with both hands, out of habit and out of practice with beginning difficult conversations with her parents. The last one was considerably better, when she'd finally told her mother she had, in fact, met a man willing to put up with her in marriage. Not Dan, she couldn't talk about Dan, and not just because of the time travel. Thinking about that future world, about a place where she had freedoms and choices, about having her skills recognized in a more complete and thorough way than she ever could have at home, it was still too painful. She felt restrictions on her behavior that she'd never felt before. Explaining that to her parents, that would have been the hard conversation. By contrast, this was easy. She just had to convince her parents she really was a time traveler.

Sure. Easy.

They came in chattering and set down the groceries, greeting her and asking her to help and for the first three or four minutes she didn't have to worry about it. It wasn't until her mother picked up the poster and started to unroll it that Liv managed to unstick her throat long enough to say words. "Mama..." she breathed, thin and reedy and inaudible with all the noise in the kitchen. "I have to tell you..."

"What's this? Oh, is this a new playbill for the theatre...?" 

Both of them fell silent, staring. A smiling picture of a handsome, confident man looked up towards the future, "hope" written beneath him in blocky letters. Beneath that, a notice signifying his presidential re-election campaign coming at the beginning of the twenty first century. It was the sort of thing that wouldn't have looked out of place at the courthouse, if the man seeking re-election to the office of the President weren't a Negro. 

"Livia..." her father asked, unable to take his eyes from the poster. "What's this?"

Her face felt rubbery and stiff at the same time. She was glad they weren't looking around to see her expression. "The future, Daddy. That's the future."


End file.
